Viewing a large image can enhance the sense of immersiveness (i.e., the sense or feeling of “being there”). For example, the entertainment industry provides panoramic display technologies such as Cinemascope and IMAX wherein the image is much larger than the observer viewing the image. However, the increase in the image size relative to the observer comes at a high cost. That is, a small increase in the diagonal dimension of the image (and subsequent modest improvement of the ratio of the image to the viewer's overall field of view) results in a large increase in the area of the image which, in turn, produces a large increase in the cost of capture of the image, image handling, memory, computer processing, transmission, and projection costs.
Accordingly, there is a need to be able to enhance the sense of immersiveness without significantly increasing the cost of the capture-to-delivery chain. More particularly, there is a need to reduce the intrusion of the outside world upon the viewer's field of view of a displayed image so as to not contradict or detract from the displayed image.
Common means of excluding the outside world from a viewing experience are special venue entertainments, an example of which is amusement park rides. Such special venue entertainments control the viewer/environment relationship to enhance a sense of immersion, but are limited in the kinds of content they can enhance by the physical inflexibility or cost of altering the environment to suit widely different content needs.
Therefore, there exists a need for a system/method to reduce the intrusion of the environment for a single venue, and also to provide a means to reduce this intrusion dynamically such that multiple immersive experiences can be delivered cost effectively in a single venue, such as a movie theater. Such a viewing system and method should enhance the sense of immersiveness, be employable in existing theaters with no/minimal retrofitting, be adaptable to the individual characteristics of theaters, be employable with existing movies and other visual content to enhance the viewing experience on an individual basis, and/or include means of comparing and correcting the output of the system relative to a reference model.